Picasso: Creator and Destroyer

"I HAVE sixty dancers,"Picasso wrote to Gertrude Stein. "I go to bed late. I
know all the Roman women." What he did not write to Gertrude was that among the
sixty dancers of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet was a twenty-five-year-old Russian
ballerina whose dainty good looks and restrained bearing had immediately
intrigued Picasso and had brought to an end the series of nameless casual
encounters that had filled the void since Eva's death. Olga Koklova was the
daughter of a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army and had been born in Niezin,
in the Ukraine, on June 17, 1891. She had left home at twenty-one to join the
Diaghilev Ballet. Her talent was too small to compensate for the fact that, by
ballet standards, she had started so late, but Diaghilev liked to include in
his company girls from a higher social class, even if they were not very good
at dancing.

Olga Koklova was, above all, average: an average ballerina, of average beauty
and average intelligence, with average ambitions to marry and settle down. For
Picasso, who had tried prostitutes, bisexual models, flamboyant bohemians,
tubercular beauties, and black girls from Martinique, Olga was so conventional
as to be positively exotic. And there was a touch of mystery about her too.
This time it was not the mystery of another reality, which Eva had radiated,
but the mystery of another country. Picasso had always found all things Russian
fascinating, even more so since his encounter with the Baroness d'Oettingen.
He, who even at the height of the war read only gossip and the comics, could
not read enough about developments in Russia, the uprisings, the fate of the
czar, the hopes of the people. In the spring of 1917, Russia fascinated him
more than ever. The Revolution had just taken place, the czar had abdicated,
and a provisional government had taken power. Many ingredients at that
particular moment in history and in Picasso's life combined to transform an
average Russian ballerina into a spellbinding creature singled out from the
corps de ballet as the object of his lavish attentions.

What Picasso was for Olga was much simpler. Women—and men—were transfixed
by his black-marble stare, charmed by "his hands so dark and delicate and
alert," enchanted by the unruly forelock of his black hair. Some, like Cocteau,
felt "a discharge of electricity" when they met him; others, like Fernande were
magnetized by "this radiance, this internal fire one felt in him." Others still
were mesmerized by the dashing bohemian who knew about opium and women and
cabarets and whorehouses, and were spellbound by his vigor, the secrets he
seemed to know and hide, his flair and his showmanship. And there were those
who were simply overwhelmed at being in the presence of the sacred monster of
Montmartre and Montparnasse, the revolutionary inventor of Cubism. But Olga
cared nothing about art except as something to decorate an apartment, was
revolted by bohemianism, and was too firmly controlled to allow herself to be
swept off her feet by animal magnetism. Also, she was a performer, and her
narcissism matched his. So she responded to his advances because he was
important in her own immediate world, someone substantial enough to have been
chosen by the legendary Diaghilev as the designer for Parade. And she
responded with caution and calculation.

The signs of future disaster were there for all to see, but Picasso was
somnambulating toward their wedding day as though on a course set by fate.
Tired of daring, he was hoping to find with Olga a haven of dignified
tranquillity and perhaps even an excuse for daring no more. He wanted to escape
from the exhausting search for absolute painting and the absolute in painting
to a world of luxurious ordinariness.

Years later he would say that he had settled on Olga because she was pretty
and belonged, however tangentially, to the Russian nobility. As a boy in
Corunna he had been rejected by the family of his first love, a girl named
Angeles, because his social background was not sufficiently distinguished. A
quarter of a century later he would settle that score. There was also the wish
to ally himself with the elite of position and wealth, a world that was still
new to him. Whether or not Olga was the right partner for life, she was
unquestionably the right partner for society. The great revolutionary of
twentieth-century art fell back in his life on the stale hope of marrying into
the aristocracy.

It was the beginning of what the Surrealist painter Matta called Picasso's
"Harper's Bazaar" period. "He was so flattered by the attention," Matta said,
"that from then on a schizophrenia pervaded his life: between his need for
privacy and his need for more and more attention." His chief remaining links
with the world of his past were Apollinaire and Max Jacob. On July 12, 1918,
Apollinaire, Max, and Cocteau, ambassadors from the past and the future, were
witnesses at Picasso's wedding to Olga, performed first in a civil ceremony at
the mairie, and then in a sumptuous religious ceremony at the Russian
Orthodox church in the rue Daru. Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Alice B.
Toklas, Diaghilev, Leonide Massine, Vollard, Paul Rosenberg—all were there to
see Picasso marry Olga with pomp and circumstance, incense, flowers, and
candles.

ON FEBRUARY 4, 1921, Olga gave birth to a son they called Paulo. The pride and
delight of being a father pushed Picasso's anguish into the background and
inspired a series of tender sketches recording Paulo's first months. Sometimes,
as if aware of the dramatic changes wrought during a child's first year, he
recorded not only the date but the hour at which the drawings were done. Soon,
however, the uneasy feeling appeared again, in a succession of pictures of
mother and child, isolated and inaccessible in their own world. There are male
children but no men in this world, where time stands still—not in blissful
timelessness but in a lumpish immobility from which every ounce of life's vital
energy has been drained. And when there is activity, it is in slow motion,
sluggish and leaden, a kind of absentminded surrender to the force of
gravity.

Olga was lethargically but obsessively preoccupied with little Paulo. There
were servants to ease her burden—nurse, chambermaid, chauffeur, cook—yet
emotionally she was incapable of stretching beyond the nursery or the ossified
niceties of fancy balls and opening nights.

ON MAY 22 Cuadro Flamenco, Picasso's fourth Diaghilev ballet,
premiered atthe Gaite-Lyrique. It was no more than an echo of what had gone
before, and this time Picasso had effectively invited himself to do the sets
and costumes—and for the meanest of reasons. Diaghilev had originally
commissioned Juan Gris to design the ballet, but when Gris arrived in Monte
Carlo, where the company was based in April, he discovered to his amazement
that his services were no longer required. "I don't know just what happened,"
he wrote to Kahnweiler. Picasso knew. Gris, his health already failing, had
been late with his designs. And Picasso, a master of intrigue, with whose
machinations Gris was unequipped to compete, immediately started spreading the
rumor that Gris was too sick to do the job. To drive his point home to
Diaghilev more forcefully, he sent his own sketches for the ballet, which were
little more than a rehash of sets—a stage within a stage—that he had
prepared for an earlier ballet and that Diaghilev had turned down. This time he
accepted them, and Picasso won a double, hollow victory: he beat Diaghilev into
submission and he beat Gris out of a glamorous job.

PICASSO and Olga saw 1922 in at a New Year's Eve party given by the Count de
Beaumont. Midnight approached, and one of the most important guests had not yet
arrived. The host announced that Céleste, Marcel Proust's housekeeper, had just
telephoned for the tenth time, to find out if the house was drafty and if the
herb tea for which she had given the recipe was ready. "Finally at midnight,"
wrote the painter Jean Hugo in his diary, "there was a sort of stir in the
crowd and we knew that Proust had arrived. He had entered together with the new
year, the year of his death.... His pale face had become puffy; he had
developed a paunch. He spoke only to dukes. 'Look at him,' Picasso said to me,
'he's still on his theme."' Picasso may not have read Proust, but he had
absorbed him.